The persecution of the poor continues with employers now accusing the unemployed of being too stupid (or let’s be generous and say “inexperienced”) to be find jobs with decent salaries. (h/t)

Here in this suburb of Cleveland, supervisors at Ben Venue Laboratories, a contract drug maker for pharmaceutical companies, have reviewed 3,600 job applications this year and found only 47 people to hire at $13 to $15 an hour, or about $31,000 a year.

As Atrios points out, it never occurs to the good people at Ben Venue Labs that they’re not paying enough to attract skilled workers, or that maybe they should provide on-site training to attract new talent.

It’s become a commonplace line of attack to hear right-wing loons like Rand Paul and Sharron Angle place the onus of unemployment on the unemployed, and of course this has been the territory of Conservatism for years: it’s your fault you’re unemployed. Intellectual giants like Rush Limbaugh constantly say things like unemployment benefits “do nothing but incentivize people not to find work.”

Today, Citizen Radio has three interviews with three equally amazing muckraking journalists. First up, Jesse Freeston, who was attacked by police at the G20 summit, then Mother Jones’s environmental journalist and one of the only reporters on-the-scene in the Gulf, Mac McClelland, and finally photojournalist C.S. Muncy breaks an important story from Louisiana. Listen here.

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Yesterday, I contacted a friend of mine, C.S. Muncy, who is a photojournalist currently raising all kinds of hell down in southern Louisiana.

C.S.’s original goal was to gain access to some of the areas being guarded by BP contractors and deemed “off limits” to reporters, but yesterday he, along with Save Our Shores‘s Judson Parker, made an unexpected discovery.

They believe that BP has been dumping sand on the beaches in order to cover up oil. You can view some video Judson shot of the beach over here.

I called C.S. to ask him about the alleged cover-up.

AK: Is it true that BP has been covering some of the oil on the beach with sand?

CM: Yeah. Yeah, this is interesting…We went down onto the beaches, and we started inspecting them. There were tar balls, tar residue, and there was some oil on the beach. Apparently, the day before there was a lot of tar balls, and BP was working in the area pretty heavily, and we started noticing there was a different consistency in the sand.

I’ve been wondering when someone was going to ask this extremely obvious question. Regular readers of my blogs (particularly at my old T/S one) know that I’ve been following this story with much enthusiasm.

..Okay, some might say “psychotic devotion.”

But Anderson Cooper, bless his little, silver Vanderbilt-spawned head, finally interviewed someone capable of putting two and two together: Fred McCallister, an investment banker with Allegiance Capital Corporation, who is going to be testifying before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee today.

ANDERSON COOPER: Fred McCallister joins us now.

Fred, why do you think that BP would prefer to use dispersants over skimmers?

The issue that BP is facing right now is whether to use what’s practices that are normal around the world, which is to try to cause the oil to come to the surface, and then deploy the right amount of equipment and the right type of equipment to gather that oil up and get it out of the Gulf.

Using the dispersants allows the oil to stay under the surface, and this accomplishes several purposes. It allows the — it makes it a lot more difficult to quantify the amount of oil that’s coming out, which has a direct impact on damages and royalties that have to be paid.

The hysterical debt Armageddonists have been screaming about the need to adopt all sorts of insane austerity policies because if we don’t, China is going to invade and enslave our children…or something. This irrational frenzy is, of course, bipartisan. Both sides of the aisle, for example, recently voted against extending unemployment benefits.

Tea Party sweetheart, Sharron Angle, specifically said citizens are “spoiled” by jobless benefits, and the US should cut unemployment benefits in order to motivate people to find work. Because – as we all know – unemployed people are just too lazy to toil, and there are millions of jobs in some secret industry sector only teabaggers know about, waiting for capable employees to fill them.

Chuck Grassley and Sharron Angle were both in excellent form today – each supplying their own special moment of WTF?! to stun the masses.

The first truth bomb was dropped by Chuck during the Elena Kagan confirmation hearings when he informed the unwashed mouth-breathers in the audience that God — not the Constitution — gives Americans the right to bear arms.

If anyone can tell me why this doesn’t violate the separation of church and state, I’ll give you a shiny new nickel — or bullet — or however our creator likes to settle bartering exchanges.

Image from fatamerican.tv

Then, there’s crazy, crazy Sharron Angle. Sometimes I imagine the lone, sane Republican standing somewhere in a wheat field, holding a gently swaying leash as he stares off into the distance vacantly, wondering if he’s made a hasty decision in allowing the Reno neophyte to scamper into the world on her own.

ANGLE: You know, I’m a Christian, and I believe that God has a plan and a purpose for each one of our lives and that he can intercede in all kinds of situations and we need to have a little faith in many things.

You see, rape is just part of God’s majestic plan, ya’ll. Along with genocide and famine.

To anyone who watched the G20 circus, the headline isn’t much of a hyperbolic stretch. Here was a country, which spent nearly $1 billion on security measures — greater than any summit’s security budget in the history of the world — and yet footage of burning police cars and shattered store windows played on loop throughout the week on Canadian television.

Where were the cops? How were a handful of fringe protesters able to create this — admittedly limited — havoc?

Naomi Klein proposes an interesting explanation. The state and cops had received widespread criticism for the tremendous amount of cash being dumped into security for this single event (78 percent of Canadians believed that the cost was unjustified,) and when some anarchists lit up their police car, they may have decided to take a long lunch break just to teach everyone a lesson.

Of course, this plainly obvious truth is obscured by a media that refuses to call right-wing legislating “activism,” but consistently labels center-to-left-wing judges and nominees as radical extremists, who should be feared and condemned.

I missed the Kagan hearings this morning, but from what I’m gathering it was pretty much a high tech lynching of Justice Thurgood Marshall. Seriously. Evidently, he was one of those “activist” judges (and a community organizer too, I’m sure)and I think we all know what he was agitating for, don’t we?

Meanwhile, she is an “out of the mainstream” elitist, weirdo (lesbian, NY Jew) who worked for a you-know-what and liked it. Ever since Beauregard Sessions ascended to the ranking Republican position on the Judiciary Committee whatever uhm … subtlety the Republican strategy once had has evaporated into crude dogwhistling.

Right. See, Marshall was a lunatic leftist extremist, but Scalia and Thomas are ideologically consistent.

Pete Peterson and his merry band of thieves recently rolled out the hilariously titled “America Speaks” propaganda tour, which was designed to brainwash citizens into voting against their own interests by supporting Social Security privatization.

Peterson wants to do this because he owns Blackstone Group, which has a subsidiary called Blackrock Financial, the firm that would — surprise! — be in charge of handling your privatized Social Security dollars, and that rerouting process could earn Peterson hundreds of billions of dollars.

The tour should be called “Peterson and Company Speak,” because it is their financial interests — not the interests of the American people — that are represented in this tour. One of Peterson’s lackeys, David Walker, is also involved in the “national discussion.” Walker is the man who openly pined for the return of debtors’ prisons, which already exist in six states, but apparently aren’t harsh enough punishment for being poor in David’s world.

If this ridiculously transparent tour actually represented Americans’ concerns, the focus would be on job creation. Numerous polls indicate that Americans’ primary concern is unemployment – not the deficit.